Mike Isaac

Twitter is working to restore service to Turkish citizens, after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blocked access to the microblogging social network.

“We stand with our users in Turkey who rely on Twitter as a vital communications platform,” Twitter’s policy team said. “We hope to have full access returned soon.”

The ban came shortly after anonymous users posted audio clips of what could be incriminating evidence of Erdogan and other top Turkish officials engaging in corruption -- clips that emerged just days before key local elections in the country. Erdogan apparently used a court order to command Turkey’s telecommunications authority to block Twitter use within the country, though many have found easy ways to circumvent the ban and access the service.

Turkish President Abdullah Gul spoke out against Erdogan’s actions -- in a series of tweets, appropriately enough -- claiming that suppression of the service should occur only if citizens’ personal freedoms were being violated.

Looks like the law doesn’t care much about Pinterest. The social photo sharing network pinned its transparency report to its company blog, revealing for the first time the number of requests for data it receives from government agencies.

The most striking thing about the report: You can almost count the number of requests for information on two hands. Pinterest said it received a total of 12 inquiries from the government over the second half of 2013, 11 of which were from local law enforcement. The remaining request came from the Federal government. All of the requests came from United States government agencies.

Pinterest receives far fewer requests compared to other tech giants in the consumer Internet space. Microsoft, for instance, received more than 35,000 requests for user data over the second half of 2013. Facebook received somewhere in the range of 15,000.

[March 10]